Darksiders: The Abomination Vault Read Online Free Page B

brutal weaponry. Splintered wood and tattered leaves, churned soil and scorched earth, stretched as far as Death could see. He could smell the blood, still wet and seeping into the dirt, but he didn’t need to; he
felt
the deaths imprinted on the landscape, sensed the newly freed souls slowly fading from the air.
    “Dust.”
    The crow squawked an acknowledgment and took wing, spiraling high and far, watching for any hint as to what had occurred—or for any imminent danger. Death dropped lightly to his feet, leaving Harvester lashed to the saddle in the full knowledge that it would answer his call should he need it. He crouched, studying the soil, but all he could tell was that a fearsome struggle had taken place.
    That much, I knew already
.
    He pressed his fingers into the rich loam, then raised them to his mask. The blood was angelic, as he’d anticipated. What he
hadn’t
expected was to find
only
angel blood. Whoever their opponents might have been, either they did not bleed, or the soldiers of the White City had not managed to injure a single one.
    The first prospect was far less disturbing than the second.
    Too many signs, too much death and blood in a confinedarea; the Horseman couldn’t hope to follow any one trail back to its source. If so many had been slaughtered here, though, where were the corpses? Why did only spilled blood remain?
    Death straightened and carefully studied the wounded forest. No sign of any other observer, enemy or ally, but
something
was off. It was nigh impossible for anything living to hide from him, yet had someone lain concealed at that precise moment, he wouldn’t have been at all surprised. He couldn’t see anyone, couldn’t hear, couldn’t sense; but he did not
feel
alone.
    A shrill cry from Dust interrupted Death’s musings. The crow was circling deliberately over a spot of woodland some few hundred paces away.
    “All right, I see you.” Death didn’t bother shouting; he knew Dust would hear, regardless. He opened his hand, calling for Harvester to settle comfortingly into his grip, and turned back toward his mount. “Looks tight in there,” he said of the thickening trees. “Follow if you can. If not, I’ll call when I need you.”
    Despair whickered once in reply, a distant, uninterested sound.
    With an impossible grace the Horseman slipped over, under, or between the obstacles in his way, leaving the ravaged swaths of churned earth and shattered boles behind. The protruding boughs might as well have been hinged doors, the overgrowth a rich carpet. On the very rare occasion when the trail was too thickly occluded even for him, Harvester carved a path with no effort at all.
    He sensed Dust’s discovery long before he could see it. The growing miasma of blood and early rot, the almost corporeal tang of the soul’s recent passing, all served as heralds of what lay ahead.
    The angel had fallen in a thicket of brambles and dead leaves as brittle as old parchment. A small gap in the canopyallowed a single finger of sunlight to prod tentatively at the body, as though it were afraid something in the foliage might leap out and bite. Without his personal attunement to the scents and sensations of death—and without Dust having spotted the angel from above—the Horseman would never have located the remains.
    No wonder, then, that whoever had recovered the other bodies had also missed him.
    Death pushed through the thistles and thorns without pause or even a second glance. The sharpest tore at the pallid flesh on his arms and bare torso, leaving shallow gouges that failed to bleed. If he felt the trifling pains at all, it showed neither in his gait nor in his gleaming eyes.
    Oddly wide and jagged gashes formed abstract patterns across the angel’s broken body. A carpeting of bloody feathers surrounded him in a disturbingly neat circle, having been knocked and torn from his battered wings. The intricate angelic script on his gleaming breastplate was marred beyond recognition,